George Bonanno

The psychologist who studied individual resilience has found that it is not rare.

In 2004, George Bonanno argued that people who go through a loss or a potentially traumatic event show far more resilience than clinicians had assumed, and that this is a path on its own rather than a faster recovery.

Ann Mastin, another of the field's leading researchers, called it ordinary magic.

When faced with an acute shock, people absorb it far more often than they break.

"I didn't think about them? What's happening with me?" If you have felt this, you're having a completely normal experience.

There's a study by Bonanno and Keltner.

They published this paper looking specifically at laughter and bereavement.

They studied a particular kind of laughter sometimes called Duchenne laughter, which is a genuine kind of laughter where the muscle around the eyes tighten, the kind of laughter that you can't fake, and they found that bereaved people who showed that kind of laughter six months after the loss reported less anger and more enjoyment.

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George Bonanno, the same researcher we've been talking about a lot, spent decades looking how people respond to loss.

And what he found was resilience was much more prevalent than we thought, not prolonged devastating grief.

Whereas I think the, um, the idea of resilience to me has been your ability to kind of almost like a tree bending, flexing in the wind and the storms, and yet able to kind of return to shape to be able to continue to flourish a- and so on.

And it, it's quite interesting because some of the, the research into this, I mean, one of the kind of the, uh, leading, uh, or pioneering researchers, George Bonanno, um, talks about this, doesn't he? I think he, he argues that recovery is the temporary experience of mental health symptoms, and then the gradual return to normal functioning after an adverse expe- uh, event.

So I guess, you know, um, if you lost your job, for example, you'd go through a period of shock or, you know, you, you might, you probably would struggle with it, might feel very anxious, and then, you know, you're able to pick yourself up, and then you find a new job, and you feel, feel better.

So that's kind of recovery.

Now, I've talked before about this on this show.

I talked about George Bonanno's work on resilience back in episode 11.

Bonanno showed that most people are more resilient than we give them credit for, and that a majority of grievers don't need clinical intervention to eventually function well again.

Well, that research matters, and, and it gave a lot of people permission to stop pathologizing their own grief.

But like that alone made me suspicious.

And then I was talking to George Bonanno.

who's literally the world's leading expert on trauma.

And when 9-11 happened in New York City, where we are, he's the one who got the billions of dollars from the US government to study it.

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George Bonanno, whose work we looked at earlier, looked at large groups of bereaved people over time and he found something that surprised a lot of people in the field.

Resilience, not prolonged grief work, is the most common outcome after loss.

Most people don't need to excavate their pain for months on end to heal.

A hundred percent.

I interviewed this researcher named George Bonanno, and he researches like resilience.

And one of my favorite questions to ask researchers is like, what's the biggest gap between what your research says and then how like most people talk about this topic online? And I asked that to him and he just started laughing.

He's like, the gap is so big for resilience.

It could be good, it could be bad.

It could be what I think is gonna happen, or it could be completely unexpected.

but I feel confident in my ability to figure things out, which takes us back to the resilience researcher, George Bonanno.

He studies really intense stuff, like how people deal with very intense things, not just learning.

So that's the first thing to say.

The second is that, you know, there's really interesting work by a psychologist named George Bonanno, who has studied people, um, who have, uh, ex- been exposed to adversity.

Sometimes it's, um, childhood trauma, sometimes it's, um, the loss of a loved one, sometimes it's, um, rape or murder, war.

What he finds really is that the majority of people who are experie- who have experienced trauma or they've experienced adversity in their background are not trapped in a perception box defined by threat.